Watch out, Google. There is a new player in the search engine scene.
Sure, you’ve heard this before, but this time it’s serious.
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a large learning model focused on language.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) and massive amounts of data, it can interact with users in a conversational manner, answer follow-up questions, acknowledge errors, reject inappropriate requests, and even expose false assumptions.
Although this chatbot developed by OpenAI is not a direct competitor to Google, it does change the way searches are performed. And this will drastically change the shape of search engine optimization.
In this piece, we look at this technology and discuss innovative ways that forward-thinking search engine optimizers are already using it to get their jobs done.
What Can You Do With ChatGPT?
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We are just beginning to tap into the potential for using machine learning and artificial intelligence in SEO and marketing.
ChatGPT is able to participate in discussions and answer questions in a way that is very close to a human being.
It can write essays, fictional stories, poems and even ad copy – which is enough to make professional writers like me a little worried.
It can be used to make content so accurate that the New York City Department of Education has already banned its use for fear of cheating.
But more than content, ChatGPT is smart enough to be used to write meta descriptions or debug code. At the moment, using it for coding is a lengthy technical process, but it seems safe to assume that it will become much easier as the learning model gets bigger.
It can also be used as a search assistant, providing answers to queries in clear and concise formats so that users do not have to search multiple web pages to find answers to their questions.
For example, if you’re looking for a beef wellington recipe, instead of digging through a dozen blog pages and scrolling past a long-winded story about how the blogger’s grandmother once prepared this dish for Winston Churchill, ChatGPT gives you a list of ingredients and preparatory steps.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, January 2023
As an SEO professional, this might sound a little scary.
But it could be a good move to embrace AI technology instead of worrying about it.
There are many ways you can use it to streamline your work and make redundant or repetitive tasks more efficient.
Let’s see how advanced SEO professionals are already using ChatGPT.
Ways That SEO Pros Are Already Putting ChatGPT To Work
1. Creating Content
Content creation can be a hassle, especially if you don’t employ a skilled (and humble) writer like me.
Can ChatGPT do this for you? Well, you can, but you should probably avoid writing web pages and blog posts.
In 2022, Google Search Advocate John Mueller said in no uncertain terms that the search engine considers content created using artificial intelligence to be spam, a violation of the company’s guidelines.
Currently, Google algorithms can identify and penalize AI-generated content, even content that uses anti-detection algorithms.
When working with AI, you should always use human supervision.
However, anyone can safely use ChatGPT to create content for social media posts, email pitches, PPC landing page copy, or even ad copy. It can also be a great brainstorming tool.
I asked ChatGPT, “What is SEO?”
Screenshot from ChatGPT, January 2023
In response, I received three well-written paragraphs with an overview of search engine optimization.
As long as you are careful, ChatGPT can help streamline many redundant content tasks such as ad variations, but you should always carefully review all generated content as it may contain inaccuracies.
2. Keyword Research And Analysis
Okay, so you’re not willing to risk the fines of getting caught using ChatGPT to create content. That doesn’t mean you can’t use its power as part of your content strategy.
ChatGPT makes keyword research practically effortless.
All you need to do is open the chatbot and type in a few of your target keywords and ask for related keywords. ChatGPT will compile a list of related keywords based on its understanding of search results.
To try out this functionality, I searched a list of keywords relevant to a banking software vendor.
A short while later, the chatbot presented me with a list of keywords and phrases that might have taken me much longer to come up with through traditional keyword research.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, January 2023
You can also use it to determine the competition for different keywords.
For a high-level example, I asked it to determine whether “basketball” or “rope net” would be easier to rank. We already know the answer, but it was nice to see the chatbot reinforce that.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, January 2023
3. Content Strategy Development
Okay, I admit, this one surprised me. I wouldn’t even have thought of it if I hadn’t seen this tweet from Joe Speiser:
6/ Outline your content marketing strategy
I asked Chatbot for an AI SaaS content strategy.
It’s pretty simple,
But you can ask Chat to extrapolate on each point until you have a detailed roadmap. pic.twitter.com/QxcvKNHJNK
— Joe Speiser ⚡️ (@jspeiser) January 2, 2023
That’s right. You can ask ChatGPT to map out a content marketing strategy for you.
While it doesn’t return detailed plans (although you could probably ask for one), it does provide a range of high-level content tactics related to a particular field.
4. Better Understanding Of Search Intent
One caveat that comes to mind when using a chatbot-created content strategy is the concern that your closest competitors will do the same. So you all make almost identical blog posts about “the benefits of AI”, “how AI SaaS can improve efficiency”, etc.
To me, this is ChatGPT’s most interesting SEO-related potential: the ability to dig deeper into the query and look beyond the words to the intent of the query.
Yes, Google is trying to do this, and yes, it has improved dramatically over the life of the search engine – but to quote a tweet from Keiran Flanagan: “Google takes your question and tries to answer it. ChatGPT takes your question and will often improve it.
In some examples, ChatGPT gives additional tips that the searcher had not thought of
Google takes your question and tries to answer it
ChatGPT takes your question and will often improve it
Great example of great study conducted by @HelloSurgeAI pic.twitter.com/ZeDJGWP2VR
— Kieran Flanagan 🤘 (@searchbrat) January 3, 2023
Although the beta version of this chatbot is not yet connected to the internet, it seems that ChatGPT’s learning capabilities will allow it to develop an exponentially better understanding of what each query is looking for, sometimes even providing information that the searcher did not know they searched.
5. Generating Good SEO Titles
As an SEO professional, you don’t need to be told that shaping your content to better answer a question will skyrocket you in the rankings. ChatGPT can help you with that.
Ask any writer and they will tell you that titles are one of the hardest things to write, especially for SEO purposes. All too often they end up as dry stuff like “How to build backlinks” or some boring equivalent.
To spice things up, I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a list of titles for a page about backlinking, and it replied with ten options, all of which were more interesting than my “how to” line.
6. Composing And Managing Analytics Reports
Screenshot from ChatGPT, January 2023
For many marketers, reports and spreadsheets are the bane of their professional lives. But companies want data to prove that your efforts are making a difference. That’s where ChatGPT can be a real game changer.
More than that, this functionality can help you identify new ranking opportunities that you might otherwise have missed.
Let’s say you want to build regular expressions for analytical reporting, but you don’t have a strong programming background. For example, you might want to filter a report by specific words to identify opportunities to expand your FAQs or how-tos.
ChatGPT lets anyone with a basic understanding of how these expressions work use the chatbot to automatically generate a list.
Likewise, if you routinely struggle with Excel or Google Sheets (and who doesn’t?), ChatGPT can take much of the headache out of writing formulas and parsing data.
AI Presents A Brave New World For SEO
I’ve only just discovered how AI can help you with these processes, but if you want more information, Search Engine Journal’s IT guru Vahan Petrosyan has an excellent article that covers these topics in more depth.
ChatGPT is an extremely impressive tool. And it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of what it has to offer and ultimately could do in the future, especially for SEO.
Just the small sampling of the functionality discussed above could potentially save you hundreds of hours per year.
However, it is not without drawbacks. First, as it currently operates, it is based on data from 2021 at the latest, which means it cannot provide information on current events.
It’s probably safe to assume that a later version of the chatbot will fix this problem, but we still don’t know how long it will take for the AI to learn new events and relate them to other topics.
Furthermore, it is not 100% accurate and unbiased. Depending on its input, it may receive and thus repeat incorrect information, while the initial dataset it was trained on may not be free of dataset bias.
Finally, as someone who grew up watching the Terminator movies, there is always the concern that ChatGPT will become self-aware and enslave humanity. To be sure, I confronted it directly.
It “thought” for a suspiciously long time before sending back this inconclusive answer:
The Final Verdict
Screenshot from ChatGPT, January 2023
ChatGPT is cool and all signs indicate it’s only going to get better.
It shows the potential to make search engine optimization much faster and more efficient.
We must do everything we can to ensure that it does not connect to the nuclear arsenal.
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